Phase Noise in Multi-carrier Systems

This thesis concerns the effect of phase noise (PHN) on multi-carrier systems such as OFDM and the detection of multi-carrier symbols affected by PHN. It is known that PHN causes mixing between sub-carriers resulting in inter-carrier interference (ICI) and rotates symbols on every sub-carrier by a certain angle called the common phase error (CPE). We explore how these two effects arise and show that these two effects are coupled to each other. We also note that higher order M-QAM constellations like 64-QAM are more sensitive to CPE than smaller constellations like 4-QAM. Based on our observations on CPE, we propose a blind CPE estimation algorithm. We then address the issue of ICI and propose a turbo receiver design to mitigate it.MAS